Michael Sasso
Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism
Dr. M.A.R. Habib
Term Paper, option (b)
01 May 2022
Gender Studies, Queer Theory, the Abject, and Kitsch
Introduction
This paper aims to familiarize its reader with gender studies—including queer theory—namely in regard to Judith Butler’s approach to it and their explanation of gender performativity. I begin by briefly summarizing gender studies and situating it amongst its related fields. I then expound on the discipline as it is explored in Judith Butler’s 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. I explicate their theory of gender performativity and indicate its significance regarding hegemonic power structures within greater society, noting how binary gender systems support discrete, heteronormative society. In exploring Butler’s references to Julia Kristeva and Mary Douglas and their focus on boundaries, the taboo, and the abject, I posit that queer theory can be applied to dominant power systems, including those that do not directly (or, at least, explicitly) oppress members of the LBGTQ+ community. Lastly, in supporting this thesis, I apply queer theory and the concept of the abject to the literary analysis of “The Grand March,” the sixth section of Milan Kundera’s 1984 novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Gender & Queer Studies: Origins
Gender studies is enmeshed with gay and lesbian studies. It is interdisciplinary, having arisen in literary and cultural theory, as well as in anthropology and sociology. It examines the “oppressive histories” of various queer and sexually non-normative groups, and it explores “the formation and representation of gender, as well as gender as a category of analysis of literature and culture, and the intersection of gender with divisions of race, class, and color” (Habib 258). Further, it examines the “structures of power that create and aim to stabilize norms in general” (Schonig 00:55). Along with queer theory, gender studies developed in the 1980s and ‘90s out of Second Wave Feminism, and one of its concerns was the “questioning of the criteria by which second wave feminists define[d] the term ‘women’” (Schonig 01:10). Both theoretically and politically, this concern was and is highly relevant. Should the definition be purely biological, resting on a person’s anatomy, chromosomes, or ability to reproduce? Might it be a sociological question, identifying women as those who are oppressed by men’s objectification? Further, is the fight for equity between the sexes complicated—or even threatened—by the inability to define ‘woman’ (Gender 2375)?
In defining the term “woman,” Butler fully rejects gender essentialism, the reductionist idea that gender is determined by one’s biology. They posit, instead, that gender is not an inherent way of being, but instead is a learned, socially constructed pattern of behaving.
Gender as Performance
In the introduction to Gender Trouble, Butler explains that they were inspired by feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and her famous statement that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” To Beauvoir, women learn behaviors and mannerisms that ultimately support the masculine concept of the Myth of Woman; by embodying and expressing such behaviors, Beauvoir believed a woman subjected herself to Otherhood.
While Butler’s concept of performative gender is similar to Beauvoir’s, it differs in significant ways. The first and most obvious difference is that gender as performance applies to women as well as men and non-binary persons. Secondly, while to Beauvoir womanhood is learned and expressed at least somewhat consciously, to Butler, gender is learned, embodied, and performed without one ever being consciously aware. While Beauvoir relates “becoming” a woman to “playacting” the role of Woman, Butler is careful to make the distinction between “expression,” which is akin to playacting, and “performance,” which is embodied inculcation. As philosophy and cinema professor Jordan Schonig explains, “[A man’s] ‘inner’ gender is not the cause of [his] outward manness. It’s the other way around” (17:35).
Because gender is a pattern of behaviors that happen over time (and can also evolve over time), Butler insists that gender is fluid and more akin to a verb than it is to a static state of being. In other words, it is not so much that I, Michael Sasso, am a man; rather, I perform manness because I have learned to act this way. In an interview, Butler stated that to be performative means that:
…it produces a series of effects…We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman…We act as if the being of a man or the being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us…actually it’s a phenomenon being produced all the time and reproduced all the time. So, to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start. I know it’s controversial, but that’s my claim. (qtd. in Schonig 13:15)
To Butler, because gender has no internalized “truth” or “essence”—that is, it has no center to “ground” it—gender is not a fact. Gender is thus a fiction built upon centuries of cultural norms and an infinite number of significations. Indeed, Butler’s argument, like that of other queer and gender theorists, is poststructuralist, “imbued with many of the anti-essentialist assumptions of poststructuralism, especially the undermining of any fixed sexual identity, viewing identity as a subject position created by cultural and ideological codes” (Habib 260). Within drag performance and the sexual stylization of butch/femme identities—what Butler calls the parodying of the concept of “primary gender identity”—the lack of “primary” gender or a gender “center” is well illustrated. In the case of drag, a viewer is “in the presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance[1]” and is witness to the “[mocking of] both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity” (Gender 2385).
And yet, because of their reliance on the illustrative examples of drag and butch/femme presentations, Butler can easily be misunderstood as suggesting that gender presentations are “an act” (again, in a way that is similar to Beauvoir’s concept of “playacting” the Myth of Woman), or that gender is a conscious choice that can be changed at will, like one’s clothes or attitude. In their later book, Bodies That Matter, Butler clarifies: “Gender is not an artifice to be taken on or taken off at will and, hence, not an effect of choice” (x). In regard to gender identity, then, Butler effectively reduces the individual’s agency in the matter; societal influences determine one’s gender.
Critiques and Controversy
Writing about gender performativity in 2022, I feel it would be inappropriate to ignore the controversies surrounding Butler’s theories. Here, I will briefly address them.
For transgender and nonbinary folks, the idea of gender performativity—especially its claim that gender is not a fact—is problematic, indicating a weakness of performativity theory. For what makes a trans person feel out of place when presenting as the gender assigned to them? Conversely, why might such a person find euphoria when they present as the gender with which they identify? Gender theory, as described in Gender Trouble, provides no satisfactory answers.
Biologist and theorist Julia Serano offers a possible solution with her Intrinsic Inclination Model. According to it, gender is neither essential (biological), nor is it entirely a societal construct, as Butler argues. Serano suggests that the truth lies somewhere in between, that individuals are “intrinsically inclined to some of the kinds of behaviors that make up [their] gender.” Importantly, within her model, the “exceptional” gender identities, including transgender identities, are part of a “perfectly normal variation [of gender identities] within the human species” (Abigail Thorn, qtd. in Schonig 22:10).
However, even if there is a biological aspect to gender identity (as Serano argues), Butler’s ideas do not lose their importance or political relevance when it comes to the construction of heteronormative power structures. No matter the case, gender is a fluid, non-discrete structure.
Societal Significance – Power Structures
As mentioned in the section “Gender & Queer Studies: Origins,” a concern of Second Wave Feminism and early gender studies was the difficulty in defining the term ‘woman.’ In identifying womanhood as a societal construct and (perhaps even more importantly) as a non-essential category, Butler reveals that, to them, the heart of the feminist struggle is not so much the subversion of power dynamics between the subject (often men) and the subjected Other (usually women). They are more interested in the productive “trouble” that occurs from questioning (and perhaps obliterating) those differences, that binary system. The heart of the feminist and queer struggle, then, is the problematic of the binary system itself, for in it, oppressive power structures are upheld. Butler writes, “With respect to gender discourse, to what extent do these problematic dualisms still operate within the very descriptions that are supposed to lead us out of that binarism and its implicit hierarchy? (my emphasis, Gender 2378).
Just as stable, essential gender is not a fact (and is therefore a fiction), so too is the idea that society can be cleanly and discretely separated into “male” and “female.” Gender studies rightfully claims that hegemonic power structures are most easily enforced when systems are neat, distinct, and discrete. Through separation and exaggeration of differences, historically, “a semblance of order is created” (Mary Douglas, qtd. in Gender 2379-80). Hence, our society is both heteronormative and benefits from discrete distinctions between gender. Recognizing the “fiction” that is gender, therefore, weakens the misogynistic, hegemonic power structure.
The Abject
For the powers that be, a challenge in maintaining discrete systems lies at the borders and boundaries between binary systems. The places where opposites meet are thus considered dangerous and taboo; that such borders are usually porous or indistinct only furthers the difficulty for hegemonic powers. Drawing heavily on Kristeva and Douglas, Butler explains how Others (usually those of nonnormative sexualities and genders) become the abject. The abject is what society at large reviles and finds disgusting, “[designating] that which has been expelled from the body, discharged as excrement, literally rendered ‘Other’…In effect, this is the mode by which Others become shit” (Gender 2381-82). As Douglas puts it, “the body is a model that can stand for any bounded system” (qtd. in Gender 2380), and by extension, various bodily orifices can represent any boundary between inside and out, “me” and “Other,” or male or female. In other words, these metaphors, of “stable bodily…sites of permeability and impermeability” (Gender 2381) and of the abject as excrement, imply that hard distinctions in society are falsehoods rooted in the public imaginary to uphold heteronormativity and cisgender-normativity.
Application of Queer Theory & The Abject
In the 1990s, queer theory came to include the examination of power structures that controlled not just people of nonnormative sexualities, but anyone who was nonnormative in general [Schonig 00:46]. In this section, I show how queer theory can be applied to a text that does not deal directly with sexually queer folks. By analyzing the section of The Unbearable Lightness of Being titled “The Grand March,” I show how queer theory can shed light on hegemonic structures that aim to maintain discrete systems through the exclusion of the abject (Gender 2381).
In “The Grand March,” Kundera’s unnamed narrator contemplates, in considerable detail, the idea of what he calls ‘totalitarian kitsch.’ To him, “kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence” (248). To this narrator, kitsch is, thus, an impossible ideal. He expounds on this idea through two examples. In the first, he describes how the second century Gnostic master Valentinus claimed that Jesus “ate and drank but did not defecate” (246), for Valentinus could not reconcile the divine with excrement. Then, as “The Grand March” takes place during the communist invasion of Czechoslovakia of the 1960s, Kundera’s second example is in regard to what he calls Communist Kitsch, the stylized ideal that Russia propagated: an aesthetic of, for example, happy comrades and a perfectly functioning society. The text’s protagonist, Sabina, hates Communist Kitsch, what she calls “the mask of beauty [Communism] tried to wear” (249).
Totalitarian Kitsch, then, is an aesthetic that represents something that never was. It is a falsehood of the collective consciousness, proliferated by the powers that be. In the “The Grand March,” Kundera shows that those powers can be religious or political. In either case, to Kundera and his novel’s narrator, a totalitarian kitsch is an attempt to make society adhere to social norms, no matter how poorly they reflect the “real” world or objective truths. Like gender—and more specifically, discretely binary gender systems—totalitarian kitsch is a social construct. Individuals or ideas that do not easily fit within totalitarian kitsch—people or ideas considered “queer” or nonconformist—are expelled as the abject and are metaphorically likened to human excrement. This idea is emphasized when Kundera claims that “everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished” from the collective imagination. According to him, infringements include (but are not limited to) individualism, doubt, women who behave counter to traditional gender roles, and gay men (252). In other words, totalitarian kitsch is the heterosexual and otherwise sexually normative power structure that expels and reviles those who do not fit neatly in its system.
Conclusion
Gender studies, having grown out of feminism and the anxiety regarding the definition of ‘woman,’ aim to probe and destabilize the normative power structures that control both women and people of other sexes and genders. Queer studies extends that destabilization to the hegemonies that aim to control all nonnormative people. Judith Butler, and others after them, have endeavored to show that gender is not an intrinsic fact, but is a socially constructed fiction that supports the aforementioned heteronormative status quo. Indeed, such hegemony requires discrete systems and neat compartmentalization in order maintain itself; thus, nonnormative subjects (sexually queer or otherwise) who are situated on borders and boundaries are considered to be abject. Kundera’s “The Grand March” equates that normative construct to the aesthetic ideals of “totalitarian kitsch.” Butler and Kundera each contend that society at large attempts to simplify, uncomplicate, and control the messiness of the world through enforcing discrete systems, and Butler and Kundera challenge and deconstruct those systems. If one considers “totalitarian kitsch” synonymous to “heteronormative power structures,” I think Butler would agree with Kundera when he writes, “[the] true opponent to totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions” (254).
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: on the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. United
Kingdom, Routledge, 1993.
Butler, Judith. “Gender Trouble.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 3rd. ed., edited by Leitch, Vincent B., et al. Norton, 2018, pp. 2375-2388.
Habib, M. A. R. Literary Criticism from Plato to the Present: An Introduction. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2011, pp. 258-263.
Kundera, Milan. “Part 6: The Grand March.” The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Translated by Michael Henry Heim, Harper Collins Publishers, 1984, pp. 241-278.
Schonig, Jordan. “Judith Butler’s Theory of Gender Performativity, Explained.” Youtube, uploaded by Film & Media Studies with Jordan Schonig, 19 Dec 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XFg8f1STLk&t=1082s.
[1] One should note that, in this instance, “performance” is meant in the theatrical sense, and not in the inculcated sense of performativity.